So, I'm building a website called "dagbok.nu", which is swedish for "diary now" :)

Anyway, when creating the Facebook application, it claims that the site URL is invalid as well as the app domain. For site url, I used "http://dagbok.nu" and for site domain, I used "dagbok.nu". Please don't reply (as I've seen others do on similar issues) that I should type the site url with the scheme and the domain without - that's exactly what I'm doing.

Right, so according to another question here, one could trouble shoot this functionality using FB's own URL scraper, so I did just that:

And the reply: Error Parsing URL: Error parsing input URL, no data was scraped
Right, so now I can assume that the reason for it being considered invalid is because of FB not being able to scrape the URL. But why?

According to this question, one of the reasons seems to be that FB has deemed the URL insecure or "spammy". I've acquired this domain from a previous owner so this wasn't all that impossible. But when doing the same thing as Matthew in that post - i.e. trying to post in my timeline using the domain "http://dagbok.nu", I didn't get any information. The status box expanded as if to include a thumbnail and information about the link, but it only contained a "(No title)" text and nothing more.

So now I don't know what to do. I've tried to check the DIG and NS records from multiple servers around the web, and everyone seems to resolve it correctly, and I've had friends double check the URL from the states as well. I can't understand what's wrong and I have no idea how to ask someone at FB how to resolve this. Does anyone here have a good advice for this? Thanks in advance! :)

EDIT
When changing the domain to another domain that points to the exact same web server and document_root, it works! So this is definitely a problem with the domain "dagbok.nu" and not with the code on that page.

EDIT
When using the debug function above - I see no activity in the server log what so ever. Facebook doesn't even contact the server. When using the alternate url - the one from the last edit, it pops up in the logs as it should.

EDIT
I filed a bug report with Facebook, And their first response was that they were going to follow up. Now, a month later, I got an email that said "We are prioritizing bugs based on impact to the developer community. As this bug report has not received much attention from other developers, we are closing it so as to better focus on the top issues", and then they told me to go here to stackoverflow to try to solve my issue - but the issue is WITH THEM, and of course no one else have reported that my site doesn't work, it affects only me, and I haven't opened it yet due to this bug!

EDIT
I wanted to file a new bug report, but I can't even that now, since they are blocking bug reports with this URL as well! What the FUCK.

Its very possible that Facebook blocked that domain in their own DNS servers. Can you try any other .nu domains to see if that's the issue?
–
Andrew FinnellApr 17 '12 at 14:21

Yes, other .nu domains works just fine. If I'm blocked for whatever reason, how would I go about inquiring Facebook about that?
–
SandmanApr 18 '12 at 7:08

Did you file a bug report with Facebook facebook.com/bugs/create? This sounds like an internal problem of theirs. Your url isn't showing up in any URIBL databases, so it shouldn't be marked as spem. Facebook just seems not to know what to do with it.
–
cpilkoMay 8 '12 at 18:21

6 Answers
6

When Facebook tries to scrap your site for information, they send a call to your server with specific user agent called "facebookexternalhit"...

Facebook needs to scrape your page to know how to display it around
the site.

Facebook scrapes your page every 24 hours to ensure the properties are
up to date. The page is also scraped when an admin for the Open Graph
page clicks the Like button and when the URL is entered into the
Facebook URL Linter. Facebook observes cache headers on your URLs -
it will look at "Expires" and "Cache-Control" in order of preference.
However, even if you specify a longer time, Facebook will scrape your
page every 24 hours.

The user agent of the scraper is: "facebookexternalhit/1.1(+http://www.facebook.com/externalhit_uatext.php)"

Your problem appears to be with your character encoding string. Your Apache server is currently sending the unsupported string latin1. You've defined your meta:content-type as iso-8859-1. See the w3c validator

The problem could be originating from either your httpd.conf or php.ini files. Change these to match your meta and restart Apache. Since the problem seems to be domain-specific, I'd check httpd.conf first.

A good theory, but if you read my OP, I wrote this: "When using the debug function above - I see no activity in the server log what so ever. Facebook doesn't even contact the server" - So the character encoding couldn't possibly be a factor.
–
SandmanOct 9 '12 at 11:29

With the mismatch and the invalid encoding string your html is invalid. That is reason enough to fix this problem and retest. You haven't yet. Facebook may not be checking it because of a cache somewhere that may or may not be maintained by you or Facebook.
–
cpilkoOct 9 '12 at 15:35

In my original post there is a screenshot of me trying to add the URL to a status update - as you can see - nothing is returned
–
SandmanMay 18 '12 at 10:45

Tried it. Your site is actually blacklisted by facebook, which could be one of the causes of your problems. I had this once with a hoster provided redirection. (It used the hoster subdomain, and I guess one of the other websites using this subdomain did nasty things :))
–
halflingsOct 7 '12 at 5:50

Yes, this has been my assumption - how do I unblock it?
–
SandmanOct 9 '12 at 11:30

If you don't provide certain minimum Facebook markup on your page, it will respond with "Error Parsing URL: Error parsing input URL, no data was scraped." I only looked at the homepage, but it appears that dagbok.nu contains no Facebook markup. I'm not sure what things must be present at minimum, but in my implementation, I assume the fb:app_id meta tag and the JavaScript SDK script must be there. You may want to take a look at http://developers.facebook.com/docs/guides/web/#plugins , particularly the Authentication section.

I discovered your question because I had this same error today for an unknown reason. I found that it was caused because the content of my og:image meta tag used an incorrect URL to the image I was trying to use. So as you add Facebook markup to your page, make sure your values are correct or you may continue to receive this message.

No, I am trying to set the Site URL, not "App on Facebook" url. It works when I use other URL's that doesn't have any FB code on it either. It must be the scraper that somehow refuses to talk to my web page and I don't know why. I have used the exact same steps to add other pages, but this domain is the only one not working as it should.
–
SandmanApr 18 '12 at 7:07

The browser indicates the site should not be trusted because it's impersonating another site using invalid security certificate from *.loopiasecure.com

Recommendation: Check your .htaccess file, CMS Settings, page redirection, and security settings. Use the above source webpages to realize those file-locations / file-names that are being served to discover what's set incorrectly.

Once that's done, I think Facebook will be happy to then debug your webpage and provide additional recommendations.

Unfortunately, there was some problems with my registrar so the site pointed to a different DNS for a while, which may have led to the symptoms you're seeing there. Sorry about that.
–
SandmanMay 18 '12 at 10:47

Had the same problem and I discovered it was an incorrect IPv6 address in the AAAA records for my domain. The IPv4 record was correct, so the site worked in a browser but FB obviously check the IPv6 records!